Apple pulls data protection tool after UK government security row

As they should, hopefully, the government will start listening at some point. You can’t add a backdoor to encryption, it’s a massive fucking security risk.

This is one of those moves that just feels deeply wrong in your gut

No one would vote for something like this

Absolute own goal from the government. Shambolic decision.

This is dangerous and worrying. I wonder if similar pressure will be applied by other authoritarian governments.

>It means eventually no UK customer data stored on iCloud – Apple’s cloud storage service – will be encrypted, making it all accessible by Apple and shareable with law enforcement, if they have a warrant.

And I’m sure no other party will ever be able to figure out how to access that data if they also really wanted to… right?

The problem is that most people in the UK will support this because “terrorism” and they don’t understand the consequences of this action.

Sadly people in the UK are docile and buy any old nonsense fed to them

I would be honest, I’m slightly uneasy at the ramifications of this.

People use cloud services like these as tools for backups and ways to store things so they can be accessed across multiple devices easily. There’s stuff that uses would have ease of mind knowing it’s encrypted.

Users shouldn’t store super sensitive information like bank statements or birth certificate scans or stuff on there. But they do store things like photos, etc.

So encryption helps protect against any hacks from fraud, identity theft, etc (except where an account is breached because of a weak password, etc)

There does need to be some form of decryption, subject to a warrant of course, that allows access for police investigations, if a user is suspected of criminal activity (though a user isn’t smart if they’re storing anything incriminating like that online anyway).

But a blanket decryption of all data is the wrong way to go about this.

I feel that instead of decrypting the data, in case of a warrant, they could’ve allowed account access to the account (reset username, password, bypass any 2FA or reconfigure it for police access), where they would’ve been able to get the items anyway, but without potentially compromising millions of other users in the process.

So they do want to look at my Resident Evil saves? Which one is Sir Kier a fan of?

This is an iCloud feature which quite frankly I think many people did not even have on in the first place because it required storing a key elsewhere.

I think it’s not the right path to go down, but they’ve obviously done it because evidently iCloud was a secure place to hide a lot of child porn and things of that nature.

The issue is for the UK gov, bad actors can just find alternatives to use as there are plenty of them. I think it’s an extremely hard issue to fight against because things are becoming a lot more secure now, but to say this will affect iPhone users in the majority is probably not true.

While this is stupid I seriously doubt many people actually had Advance Data Protection on, if I remember correctly it had some downsides so that it didn’t make sense for “normal” people to turn on anyway.

I turned it on when I heard about it a month ago, because I don’t want governments snooping my stuff even if it is random screenshots of fantasy football or dog photos.

At some point they will want direct access.